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Raid

I have a bunch of extremely small HDs, which are 200 MBs to 500 MBs each. I need more HDs, but they need to be at least 1 GB to actually be of any use to me. So lately I've been considering RAID, but I have absolutely no experience with RAID, so I'm a little afraid to just jump into it. Is RAID much more difficult to setup than IDE? Do you think that this would be a good solution? Would it be worth it? I know RAID controllers are extremely expensive. Any suggestions on which Linux compatible controllers would be a good choice?

“People don’t talk about anything.” [Clarisse]
“Oh, they must!” [Guy]
“No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else. And most of the time in the cafes they have the joke-boxes on and the same jokes most of the time, or the musical wall lit and all the colored patterns running up and down, but it’s only color and all abstract. And at the museums, have you ever been? All abstract. That\'s all there is now...\"
-A conversation with Clarrise McClellan and Guy Montag from Fahrenheit 451

If I were you I'd go out and buy a 20 Gig IDE drive for $75 at your local department store. You'll save yourself a HUGE headache if you do that.

Think about it this way, would you rather have a $1.00 bill, or 100 loose pennies? If you mess with RAID on such small drives it'll be like walking around with 100 pennies in your pocket. (not in a roll of course)

If you are 1. really cheap and 2. have a lot of time on your hands, then go for the RAID. Otherwise it probably isn't worth it - expecially since you seem to have a variety of drives and all the drives in the RAID have to have the same size.

All drives in a RAID array have to be identical in size, so you can't put a 200 meg drive on the same array as a 500 meg drive. Besides, if you want to do a RAID, using small hard drives just isnt worth it. RAID arrays are used to stripe large amounts of data across multiple hard drives for increased security for data, and increased speed in the reading and writing of data. If you really want to do a RAID array, do a RAID 5 array with 30 gig drives. I don't think you will find it worth your time, though.